[Insight & Opinion] The President's Feed and Death by Overwork

Lee's X Feed Draws Growing Attention
The Content Matters More Than the Frequency
Risk When SNS-Based Messaging Goes Off Track

Presidents have found social networking services (SNS) attractive because they can deliver messages to the masses without the mediation of television or newspapers. The one who embodied this concept of "going public" was U.S. President Barack Obama. The spread of the health insurance program known as "Obamacare" owed a great deal to the #GetCovered campaign on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

President Lee Jaemyung has recently been filling up his X (X, formerly Twitter) feed with posts at a rapid pace. The media has expressed concern about the president’s frequent use of social media, but the posting frequency itself is not the real issue. President Lee uses X, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube together, but X seems to suit him best, and he treats X as his "main" platform. From June last year through January, he posted about 40 posts per month on X. In February, he began posting even late at night and on holidays, with as many as six posts a day, showing signs of a "SNS storm." However, there are tallies showing that U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted more than 25,000 times during his first term. President Lee does fall into the "high-frequency" group, but he is nowhere near President Trump’s level.

What matters is the content of the posts. Lee Jaemyung’s X has shown the positive potential of the platform. A post about installing additional cameras in the briefing room recorded 18 million views. Posts about a Xiaomi selfie with Chinese President Xi Jinping, a joint performance with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, his pet dog Bobby, his commute home with Duttonku, a teaser clip at the Park Jinyoung RM photo zone, and performances with Stray Kids and Le Sserafim all surpassed 1 million views. A post linking to an Exclusive article in The Asia Business Daily titled "Workload at the Blue House at an All-Time High" drew 2.5 million views. What these successful, communication-driven posts had in common was that they turned political messages into events, made them more human, and softened them.

Yet perhaps because of this overflowing confidence in SNS, his recent content increasingly runs counter to that established formula for success. It is showing signs of "ideologization, de-personalization, and rigidity." First, there has been a surge in simple expressions of opinion. According to News Bus, 48.5% of President Lee’s X posts in January were "opinion statements" (33 out of 68). Instead of activities, events, and achievements appropriate to the presidency, opinions frequently dominated his feed. The "real estate commentaries" that President Lee "relentlessly" poured out conveyed an ideological bent, such as attacks on multiple-home owners, and at times sounded hollow because they were not clearly linked to concrete policy outcomes. Posts that appeared to boost ruling-party figures mentioned as potential candidates for the Seoul or Busan mayoral races could also invite misunderstandings regarding presidential neutrality and contributed to the ideologization of the account.

President Lee’s X frequently de-personalized his targets with strong and emotional language such as "cannot understand the context and meaning of language," "why are you siding so far with this nation-wrecking speculation," "inhuman," "ruin your family," and "vicious tyranny." The fact that some posts were later deleted is not unrelated to the overall rise in the intensity of his language. During the Lunar New Year holiday, People Power Party leader Jang Donghyuk appeared twice on President Lee’s X. A post aimed at Jang, who owns six homes, asked, "Do you believe we should not regulate multiple-home owners and must maintain their privileges?" Jang hit back, saying he had "almost died from overwork trying to answer the president’s SNS questions" and demanding that President Lee "clarify what he will do about reconstruction lottery apartments." After this, media reports about a "renewed SNS war of words between President Lee and Leader Jang" poured out.

President Lee’s X is coming to resemble the negativity of Trump more than the positivity of Obama. When presidential public relations via SNS veer off course, it becomes dangerous. It can lead to contamination of the president’s popular image and may have a negative impact on approval ratings, and this risk needs to be recognized.

Professor Heo Manseop, Gangneung-Wonju National University